This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Like many Mormons, John Gustav-Wrathall was troubled when learning of the new LDS policy dubbing same-sex couples as "apostates" and barring their children from baptism and other religion rites until they become adults.
Now, though, Gustav-Wrathall finds reasons to be "cautiously optimistic."
Last week, the gay Latter-day Saint who lives in Minneapolis with his husband and children, had a "series of meetings with church leaders in Salt Lake City in my capacity as president-elect of Affirmation, the world's largest and oldest organization for LGBT Mormons and their families and friends," he writes in a post at the LDS blog Times & Seasons. "This was the first meeting between a leader of Affirmation and church leaders since the promulgation of the new policy."
The Mormon officials "were anxious to meet with me. They were eager to hear my account of the impact of the policy as I had observed it and people's reactions to the policy as I had heard them," he writes. "Far from treating me as persona non grata (as some might assume an individual in an 'apostate' marriage would be treated), I was received with kindness and respect and as a member of our community of faith."
Gustav-Wrathall "witnessed genuine empathy and concern, and genuine wrestling," he says. "What I can say without the least shadow of doubt is that our leaders see the church as an inclusive community founded on love, and yearn for all to be a part of it, LGBT people no less than any others. ... They are as perplexed by the dilemmas faced by LGBT individuals and their families as anyone else."
The intent, these leaders told him, was not to "stigmatize individuals," but rather to "clarify church doctrine on marriage and the family as it currently stands, not to stigmatize individuals."
In the 1960s, Gustav-Wrathall writes, the Mormon view of homosexuality "was virtually indistinguishable from the dominant view in American culture."
To both groups, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals often met in "red-light districts, in contexts where substance abuse and promiscuity were normal. Popular in the gay subculture were 'sex liberation' and countercultural ideologies that romanticized 'queerness' and indignantly condemned marriage as an oppressive bourgeois institution."
In recent decades, though, Americans see "LGBT people and an LGBT culture that increasingly embrace family and faith, sobriety, engagement and commitment," he says. "The movement for marriage equality is the tip of that iceberg."
And the data increasingly demonstrate that "gay people flourish in gay marriage. It is good for them," Gustav-Wrathall writes. "It grounds them spiritually. It affords them greater stability. It creates family and community and connects them to larger family structures and social institutions."
So where does that leave The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sees marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman?
In flux, Gustav-Wrathall says, and searching for "a new paradigm, a new doctrine, a new understanding of the place of LGBT people in the plan of salvation [that] would still require sacrifice, discipline, faith, hope and love, even if — especially if — gay relationships were somehow encompassed in that new understanding."
He, too, has found himself searching for answers.
"In the days after the news of the policy hit, I prayed. I pleaded. And I found a broad, abiding, powerful peace," Gustav-Wrathall writes. "I found assurance that God has not forgotten me or my husband or our sons. I saw a way of light opening up before us, like the waters of the Red Sea parting. This is not the end. It is a beginning."
The church's "journey" with the question of homosexuality "is full of tragedy," he says. "But I also see the hand of God in it. ... The current policy predicament is jolting us awake. And the Lord is not abandoning us — any of us — in this process. His Spirit is being poured down, on all flesh."
Peggy Fletcher Stack